When the Ocean Sends a Cry for Help

Answering Looks Like This

By Evelyn McDonnell

I never imagined I would be here, kneeling astride a juvenile California sea lion. I’m trying carefully to keep her still while the animal hospital staff conducts an intake evaluation of their newest patient. The poor pinniped wants to thrash with fear, understandably. She’s less than a year old, probably recently separated from her mom, and was found — like the heroine of a Patti Smith song — washed up on Redondo Beach, tired and hungry. Our rescue team brought her to the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, where I’m now sitting on top of her, trying not to crush her.

She may be stressed but she’s a fighter, and my bad ankle is starting to ache by the time the staff performs the final task: shaving her identification number into the brown fur on her side. I ache more when I hear the digits. In a typical year, MMCC receives a total of about 300 animals. This is not a typical year. It’s only April 8, and I’m already restraining the 247th marine mammal brought to the center in 2025.

An unusually early and toxic algae bloom has caused a massive domoic acid poisoning event affecting pinnipeds, dolphins and seabirds all along the Southern California coast. While there have been other serious outbreaks in the 24 years since DA was first identified on the West Coast — the summer of 2023 was also harrowing — the early arrival and the morbid intensity of this event are straining local resources. Ash and runoff from the fires may be exacerbating the natural phenomenon, leading to heartbreaking scenes of dolphins stranding on public beaches, gasping for breath.

This is why MMCC, the International Bird Rescue Center, and other coastal wildlife centers have an immediate need for more folks like me: volunteers who can help feed, clean, input data, make gruel, wash dishes and educate. I work full-time as a university professor and writer. I came to animal care with little training besides a lifelong love of nature. But from my first visit to MMCC, when I discovered the people I was watching throw herring into pools of leaping sea lions were civilians like me, I was hooked. I realized I needed to learn from a “form of life that has much to teach us about … vulnerability, collaboration, and adaptation,” as Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.

So for the last eight and a half years, on Tuesday mornings, I join the crew of staff and volunteers who have become a kind of family. It’s grueling, sometimes disgusting work. But I get to go home and feel like maybe I helped save a life that day, like I did something to try to remedy the mess my species is making of this planet.

“We couldn’t do what we are doing without volunteers,” says Dave Bader, chief operations and education officer at MMCC. “From care and feeding to response and rescue, to education, volunteers help us with all of these things.”

Mutual aid has become a buzzphrase of our times, as people provide the material, moral, and spiritual resources for each other that our government has abandoned. With President Trump also cutting funds and personnel at earth-protecting institutions such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, humans need to extend our support to the other life forms with whom we share the planet. Marine mammals particularly compel attention, because they are like us in so many ways — we are the same breastfeeding, warm-blooded, live-birthing family — and yet here we stand rooted to the land, and there they go, hunting and feeding and playing and thriving in the water.

And sometimes not thriving.

FEBRUARY STRANDINGS

The first inklings of the current DA event were detected back in December in Baja California, according to Dr. Clarissa Anderson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The cold-water upwellings were indicative of La Nina, a cyclical weather event that has caused DA outbreaks in the past. It takes a while for Pseudo-nitzschia plankton blooms to work their way up the food chain to marine animals. Sea lions, dolphins and seabirds began stranding in February. It looks likely that the 2025 dolphin and bird strandings will surpass those of the past three years. “This is just larger numbers than we’re used to,” Anderson says.

DA particularly affects adult female sea lions who have consumed large numbers of fish to feed the fetuses they are carrying inside. This year, numerous adult males have also been affected. At MMCC, that means our animal rescue team netted and transported dozens of XXL sea lions — I’m talking hundreds of pounds here — to our facility tucked between Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Fort MacArthur and the John Olguin campus of San Pedro High School. Many come in so weak they barely move. The mothers may miscarry, or give birth to pups that they are too sick to nurse. With fluids and medicine delivered subcutaneously or orally until they can eat on their own again, less than half of sea lions recover enough to be released. The rest die or are euthanized. DA is fatal for dolphins.

Patients are brought to MMCC year-round with injuries and illnesses that we can’t always save them from — many of them human-caused, including fish-net entanglements, gunshot wounds and cancers likely triggered by human poisons such as dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT. Late winter is always the start of our busy season when pinniped pups separate from their mothers and sometimes wind up in our care. Rehabbing juvenile elephant seals, sea lions and harbor seals generally just takes our highly nutritious fish gruel, daily vitamins, and maybe some medicine. Helping an elephant seal, with its round Keane eyes and ridiculous braying laugh, go from being tube-fed gruel to hand-fed fish to hunting for live fish on its own is a deeply rewarding experience. We are careful to not let the patients bond with us — we avoid eye contact, or talking to them. If they are to be released back to the ocean — the ultimate and usual goal — they must stay wild.

But it’s impossible not to have a soft spot for certain flippered beings. I will never forget the first sea lion neonate — just a day or two old when he came in — whom I got to help bottle feed one summer. I wrapped him in a blanket and held him while the veterinarian made sure he sucked down his special infant formula.

ASHES TO ALGAE

But you can’t restrain and tube-feed a 700-pound sea lion. There is little romance in treating large pinnipeds being ravaged by domoic acid poisoning. With good care and luck, they revive, but the neurotoxin wracks their brains, and then, as they come to their senses, they understandably want out of these cement pens and to return to the sea. They are angry, scary, sad, difficult. And plentiful. From Feb. 20 to March 28, MMCC responded to 191 live animal strandings, compared to 51 for the same period in 2024. Our rescue hotline receives an average of 4,000 calls a year. We had 2,120 calls just in March.

The intensity of the bloom is also indicated by the Pseudo-nitzschia counts from samples taken at the Santa Monica Pier. “We’re seeing high cell abundances — like, really high, higher than I’m used to seeing in general in coastal California … like, millions of cells per liter,” says Anderson, who directs the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System. “Our bloom threshold is 10,000 cells per liter. So seeing those kinds of numbers at Santa Monica Pier in particular really stood out to me. I haven’t seen that maybe ever at that pier.”

Santa Monica Pier is less than two miles from the Palisades Fire burn site. While there is no definitive proof that nutrient runoff from the fire has exacerbated the bloom, previous studies have shown that nitrate from ash can stimulate plankton production. “It stands to reason there could certainly be local stimulation,” Anderson says in the measured tones of a scientist.

Bader is certain other factors are exacerbating the fourth year in a row of DA crises. “Climate change, ocean acidification, nitrification — we’re changing ocean conditions to favor the formation of harmful algal blooms,” he says. “These are naturally occurring algae that are blooming with greater frequency and intensity because of the aforementioned factors.”

Anderson says oceanographic data shows that the Pacific Ocean’s water has been changing, though researchers are still trying to understand why. “From the long-term time series we’ve looked at from data off the California coast, from these deep waters that fuel upwelling, those waters have changed in nutrient composition over the last 20-plus years,” she says. “Why? Is that climate change? Is that something else? Well, it’s happening at a very big basin scale, and the way that the nutrients are changing in that water is exactly the way you need it to be to stimulate domoic acid production.”

RESOURCES SLASHED

Unfortunately, scientists’ ability to monitor and track data to help us understand what is happening to the oceans and the animals who depend on them is under attack. According to NPR, Trump plans to eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, that conducts vital research on our oceans and climate. “The monitoring that we do, which is mostly NOAA funded, is reliant on instruments and personnel that exist because of NOAA funding, and then if we suddenly cannot continue to operate them, that will be pretty devastating,” Anderson says.

Cuts and layoffs this year have directly impacted our ability to understand the current DA crisis, according to Anderson. Tissues from impacted animals “typically go to a NOAA lab in the Pacific Northwest, and that lab cannot spend a dime there,” she says. “They’re not able to process any samples right now and may have to even get rid of their lab technician who does all of these samples for the West Coast and Alaska. So that is a big problem, and that’s hampering our ability to say much about what’s happening to these animals.”

“We are strong partners of NOAA and rely on them for our support,” Bader says.

The slashing and burning of the agencies tasked with studying and saving our slashed and burned planet directly impacts human beings and their own ocean-based activities. There are statistical indications that DA could be related to high incidences of Alzheimer’s, but without labs to process those samples, we may never know. DA is not the only poison out there; Saxitoxin is causing paralytic shellfish poisoning, which can sicken and kill creatures who eat mussels, clams and oysters, including people.

Saving our oceans and their inhabitants from the harm humans have already caused them is just the right thing to do: for us and them. Among the many tasks the MMCC needs volunteers to do, the most critical is education: Teaching people who these close human relatives are, and how we can help them.

Animal releases — watching a rehabilitated being return to the body of water that is his home, that he might not have seen for months, or maybe never swam in — are my favorite volunteer task. Almost one year after I got to help feed that first neonate sea lion, I watched him jump off a boat near San Miguel Island and swim away with a handful of other yearlings. He porpoised happily through the waves and never looked back.

Visit https://marinemammalcare.org/ to find out more about the Marine Mammal Care Center, sign up to volunteer, or donate. If you see a stranded marine mammal, stay 50 feet away and call 800 39 WHALE. If you see a politician, gently restrain them and explain why institutions such as NOAA, NASA, MMCC, and IBR need our support, now more than ever.

Evelyn McDonnell writes the series Bodies of Water — portraits of lives aquatic — for Random Lengths. She is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University. Her most recent book is The World According to Joan Didion.